Madrid Day 1

Tracy and I got up early and went for breakfast near the hostel, packed our bags, checked out, and hopped on the Thameslink train to Gatwick. We are meeting my parents in Madrid..

My parents are Morocco, flying back to Madrid today, after doing a two week G Adventure trip of Spain, Portugal and Morocco. While we were waiting for our flight, I got an email from my mom, apparently it was mayhem in Morocco, something about the king of Morocco decided abruptly he didn't want Morocco to roll back their clocks this weekend. Unfortunately, no one else was appraised of this decision, so everybody's phones were the wrong time, there was mayhem at the airport.

We arrived in Madrid about 3:45. We had to get our passports stamped, which I found a bit odd, since we entered the EU in London (Brexit deal isn't finished yet). We waited for my parents, who arrived at a different terminal, then they made their way to where we were waiting, around 5:00pm.

We got a cab to central Madrid and checked into Hotel Europa. We made arrangements to meet downstairs at 7:00 for supper. It ended up that my parents got a room only 2 down from us, so it's easy for us to visit. After Tracy and I showered and got clean, we visited their room, and they were having a huge issue. They had lost some of their cards, a debit card and an iTrade card. They checked everywhere, all over. So, dad's fuming and trying to figure out what cards they need to cancel, and how to do it and my mom is trying to keep him calm. Tracy and I snuck out, and went downstairs and walked around outside for a while. After 30 minutes, we went back and dad was still on hold, trying to cancel his iTrade account, and he's absolutely livid, because he couldn't figure out how to make a collect call from Spain back to Canada. He tried everything, and nothing was working, so he ended up making a regular long distance call back to Canada, and was terrified of the long distance charges he was going to see.

We snuck back out, and went for supper. I had an amazing pasta and Tracy had pizza. Tracy couldn't finish the pizza, so we got the leftovers in a box. Afterwards, we went back to my parents room, and my dad was furious, he'd been on hold for sooo long, and he's paying for it. We left them the leftover pizza and snuck out again, back to our room.

After a while, Tracy was getting ready for bed, I decided I would try and see how my parents were doing again. I was a bit terrified about how my dad would be. They did end up getting everything dealt with, and I told my dad how much his call would cost him (less than $18), I think in his brain he was imagining hundreds and hundreds of dollars on his phone bill. He was relieved, and they did end up eating the pizza we left.

We made arrangements to meet at 8:00am tomorrow morning.